Raffaele and Connie Accetta's home suffered major flooding during superstorm Sandy, as did their Moonachie deli. They have been concentrating on repairing the deli first. The damage to their home was confined to the first floor, above.

Gone are the sad curbside displays of soggy furniture, molding drywall and broken bits of family keepsakes that made this middle-class town's plight unmistakable. Submerged in a matter of minutes by a tidal surge that overwhelmed nearby flood controls, low-lying Moonachie and neighboring Little Ferry were North Jersey's version of the Shore towns or the Rockaways, the hardest hit for miles by this historic storm.

But the appearance of a return to normalcy in Moonachie is deceptive. Three months after the storm and the tidal surge that inundated the town, people are still struggling. A couple who own a deli put every asset they had into rebuilding their store; they have managed to re-open, but business has not returned nearly as much as they had hoped. The only pharmacy in town is still closed and the owner has moved to Florida, though the longtime head pharmacist has decided to buy the business and reopen.

Members of a close-knit family with three houses on a block are just now getting back some of the everyday comforts they once took for granted, like bathtubs and working ovens, but the family's matriarch has been told that, because of a technicality, her still-gutted home will not qualify for a loan from FEMA.

These people, like countless others in Moonachie and Little Ferry, have emptied retirement accounts, taken on staggering amounts of debt and put in countless hours of manual labor. But there is still much more work to be done.

A too-quiet morning

At the tail end of another quiet morning at Margie's Deli on Moonachie Street, the changes Sandy brought are measured in what is missing.

The freshly laid tiles on the floor are gleaming. The display refrigerators along a wall in the dining room hum. But there are no shouts from Raffaele Accetta in the kitchen, who jokes that when the line at the register grows several miles deep, as it used to at 9 a.m. on a weekday morning, he reverts to swearing in his native Italian.

On this Tuesday morning, Rosa Stefano, the sandwich maven, was preparing for lunch behind the counter. Raffaele, who goes by Ralph and owns the place with his wife, Connie, was training a new cook in the kitchen — the first new addition to the now four-person staff in months. Connie was wiping tables.

"How's the roasted chicken," she called to the kitchen.

"It's ready," Ralph replied.

"And the lentil soup?" Connie said, softly. Ralph didn't answer.

The calm is unnerving to the Accettas, high school sweethearts who grew up in Hoboken and borrowed deeply from their friends and family members to completely renovate and reopen the deli as soon as they could after the storm. They are proud of the transformation.

The first time they were allowed to return after the flood, so much spoiled food was strewn across the storeroom that it blocked the door. Floodwaters carried the freezers across the floor, which was covered with an oily silt.

They reopened quietly on Dec. 17, but more than a month later, many of their regular customers and commercial catering clients have yet to return.

"I guess it's because they don't know that we're open," Connie said. They are planning a formal reopening sometime soon.

The Accettas spent $65,000 to rebuild the deli, and they estimate that between the damage and lost business, the storm cost them as much as $140,000. They've been putting so much energy into rebuilding that they haven't even begun to repair the extensive damage to their Little Ferry home. After long days at the deli, they return to a plastic sheet blocking what used to be their kitchen. The couple recently received a letter from the insurance company informing them their policy would be canceled because they didn't pay the bill in January — a notice Connie found almost comically insensitive after the hours she has spent on the phone trying to get copies of documents damaged in the flood.

"It's been very tough," Connie said. "Once we leave here, we go home and we have that whole other situation."